Public asked to report winter weather on smartphone apps

When rain, hail or ice pellets fall in Ventura County, researchers in Oklahoma want to know.

The National Weather Service has upgraded its radar network, installing equipment that provides a much better picture of precipitation. The move is expected to improve forecasts, helping everyone from emergency responders to pilots better assess and prepare for dangerous conditions.

But even with the so-called NEXRAD radars nationwide, researchers need some help to make sure they are getting the most accurate information. By enlisting the public's help, they are comparing information coming from the radars to actual observations on the ground. Armed with that data, they are constantly refining models that diagnose precipitation based on what the radars pick up.

"This is useful to a lot of people," said Kim Elmore, a research scientist at the University of Oklahoma Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies and principal investigator on the project.

The PING (Precipitation Identification Near the Ground) Project is a collaboration between the university and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory.

It started small several years ago, but now takes reports, or PINGs, nationwide. Last month, officials launched mobile apps, called mPING, and lauded the response.

"People started snapping it up faster than we could imagine," Elmore said.

With thousands of reports coming in each week, he said, it already has proved to be much more effective than other efforts to cull data.

Elmore said graduate students also have manned phones, calling people in areas where radars picked up interesting winter weather. Students ask people who answer the phones about the weather outside.

"A lot of people hung up on us. But a fair number would go look out a window and come back and tell us," Elmore said.

At some point, someone said: There should be an app for that.

The free app came online in mid-December and word has spread over social media, creating a huge response. "We're astonished," Elmore said. "I'm completely gobstopped. I never even imagined this."

When students called people on the phone, they collected 1,236 usable reports over a two-month period. In the first month of the app, they got 25,000 reports from across the country.

Researchers expect some accuracy problems but plan to weed out questionable reports by looking for consistency in observations.

"I think it's a great idea," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "It's a way to harness the technology."

Sometimes people armed with smartphones can wreak a little havoc with weather reporting, he said. But this could use people's penchant for reporting on weather in a good way.

"The climate is changing now," Patzert said. "There's some indication that weather events are becoming more severe — more costly and more deadly."

That makes forecasting technology improvements more important than ever.

"This might really put us more on top of the entire situation," Patzert said. "All of the computer power and cellphone power in the world — let's do something positive with it."On the Net: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/ping